Search is dead

In a recent whitepaper, bigtincan declared that “Search is dead.”

This announcement came as a shock and with sadness for all of us at Funnelback. We’d been working toward a bright future for search and it was taken from us too soon.

In its whitepaper, bigtincan support the idea that the contemporary desktop-centric search paradigm is dead because it doesn’t support the new paradigm of discovery, aggregation, correlation, and content relevance.

Funnelback's take on this? bigtincan are right to say the role of search is evolving, but a more accurate life analogy would be that search is at the end of its awkward adolescent years and is maturing into an intelligent, proactive, and articulate adult.

Another way of looking at this new role of search is that it empowers digital transformation. Even for the most technology adept and flexible organizations, there are significant digitalisation challenges involved in making the customer experience:

• Personalized and relevant
• Valuable
• Consistent
• Mobile friendly
• Fast

This fledgling adult search engine would accept this customer experience challenge with swagger. 

Its newly minted proficiency shifts emphasis away from old school statistical ranking systems toward machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, lifting the tedium of creating actionable lists based on dry search data analytics.

It is learning to act like an adult, providing insightful answers to queries by surfacing relationships between people, places and organizations mentioned in content. The search engine is learning to understand what a user is actually trying to ask for, read between the lines, and provide a more relevant response to poorly phrased questions.

This opportunity to move beyond raw analytics and provide actionable intelligence will enable search administrators to take on more exciting challenges such as content analysis, automatic delegation and streamlined governance (yes, we did just mention the words ‘exciting’ and ‘governance’ in the same sentence).  

We concede that the old search engine as you knew it with its primitive opportunities for analysis has become far less exciting in the wake of maturing search technology. But search is not dead. We urge you to let this fired-up young adult give your organization the edge it needs to dominate its customer experience journey.